(3.5E) Aw, crap...

[jdavis]

Never used them, never needed them and don't plan on starting to use them now. Don't want to own them, don't want to paint them, don't care to use them, never have needed them to have exciting combat. I guess it's just what you are used to, what do I need to play D&D, one character sheet, one pencil and a small bag of dice. We usually sit in living rooms to play not at a big table, it would be really annoying to set up a battle map on a coffee table across the room from where I am sitting and for me to have to walk over there for two or three rounds of I hit the orc with my sword. We just have never played that way and after 25 years I really don't care to make such a drastic change in the way I play the game. I understand why people would like that and I don't think there is anything wrong with either way of playing, and I don't see where either way is superior to the other, they are just different, free flow descriptive battle vs tactical battle on a map. We used to play Mechwarrior and it seemed that the battles took forever and the roleplaying never happened, I love sitting around a big map and having tactical encounters but it wasn't roleplaying it was a tactical encounter. I'm sure for a lot of people they are the same but in my experience they just never mixed really good. We can finish up simple combat in 10 minutes or less, it would take that long for us to set up a map and counters. When we have a major encounter it could take hours but we enjoy the roleplaying of it out, nobody cares about how many squares or feet or inches or meters (or whatever) they are from the monster they move and attack, the DM says whether the mosnter got a attack of Opportunity or not and we move on with combat, nobody cares about facings, if you are trying to flank a creature then you say hey I'm trying to flank the creature, the DM says whether you can or not and how many rounds it will take you to get to where you want to be, and you move on, trying to learn how to do that with minatures would be a whole different game for me and I don't care to learn it. It isn't a good or bad thing, it is a preference thing. It doesn't matter to me who uses them or who doesn't use them it only matters if you have fun playing the game the way you are playing it.

If they change the game to try and force minatures then they are stupid, because there are lots of people who don't use them and don't want to use them. I don't think they are that stupid to alienate a big part of their target audience by forcing you to use miatures, I think they are just fleshing out the rules in that direction so as to try to get people to buy their new line of minatures. Regardless of how D&D was originally written to be played there is a huge number of people who just don't use minatures (I have never actually met anybody who has even tried to use them in 25 years of playing D&D, I didn't even think they were that popular till I started posting here). Forcing minature use would anger a large percentage of their fanbase, they are not going to change the rules to force it, they are just going to try and sell some little plastic men. It will not affect me at all, I will do things the way I like and if we have to house rules combat or use the "old rules" well I am fine with that.

 

[Greatwyrm]

Any time there is any change to D&D, everybody freaks. Calm down, people.

Remember when 3e was still in the works and we knew it was coming? "Oh my, WotC won't support 2e any more, the money grubbing boogers! Well, I'm not switching! Let me see them try and make me!" How many times did you hear something just like that? Heck, you may have said it yourself.

But you know what happened? Everything was okay. There are still people who play OD&D, 1e, 2e, 2e w/ the Players Option series, and 3e. We're all still alive. No blood was shed. The sun still came up.

Odds are, this whole minitures argument will go the same way. All of you people who hate minis aren't going to have your books reposessed. If you're already going to the trouble of keeping track of combat in your head, WotC measuring things in feet, meters, squares, or widget-spans isn't going to matter to you anyway. Those who use minis will just have an easier time of it.

As for the new plastic minis, collectable or not, if you don't like them, don't buy them. Use coins or dice or bottle caps, just like we did for the last 30 or so years. It really is that simple.

 

[Psion]

Any time there is any change to D&D, everybody freaks. Calm down, people.

Remember when 3e was still in the works and we knew it was coming? "Oh my, WotC won't support 2e any more, the money grubbing boogers! Well, I'm not switching! Let me see them try and make me!" How many times did you hear something just like that? Heck, you may have said it yourself.

But you know what happened? Everything was okay. There are still people who play OD&D, 1e, 2e, 2e w/ the Players Option series, and 3e. We're all still alive. No blood was shed. The sun still came up.

On that issue, perhaps. I can also remember good games ruined by companies due to being too heavy handed in revisions.

While I don't think this will ruin D&D, I do think it has the real potential to limit the fun and utility of upcoming releases. That, I think, is worth voicing our opinion on in the hopes that they back away from this "miniatures in your face" marketing blitz and go back to their original 3e philosophy of "options not restrictions."

 

[Paradoxish]

Personally, I find miniatures cumbersome. My reason is this: without miniatures, I can focus on and deal with those parts of the combat that everyone is interested in or is risky, and ignore (or just briefly describe) those things that I know will go one way or the other. I have narrative freedom from too much detail.

I don't mean to argue with your opinion or personal preference, which you're certainly free to have, but I just want to bring up a counterpoint to it. Realistically, your actions in combat would be affected by what's happening around you. If you're up close and personal with Mr. Ogre and there are five orcs twenty feet off you're going to react differently than you would if it were just you and the ogre. Personally, I feel that miniatures/counters/some form of battlefield representation give me the chance to create more interesting situations for the players to get through.

Also, I prefer to spend my time describing the other combatants and their actions instead of the distance between the PCs and their enemies. At least this way I don't have to preface each round with a summary of distances between combatants...

And truth be told, they're a better target audience for a combat-heavy system like D&D, because combat-heavy systems and miniatures are strongly overlapping groups.

I think you also have to consider the type of group you'll be gaming with. I've played with (and continue to play with) groups that I would never dream of simply describing a combat to and I've also played with groups where miniatures are only used on occassion, for the large battles. I also don't mean to imply that one group is more combat heavy than the other, they just have differing play styles. My current saturday group, for example, has their hack & slash days and they have days where we can play for ten hours straight without a single combat. When we do get into a combat they like to know what's happening where.

 

[Geoffrey]

It doesn't sound like 3.5 is going to be very easy to carry around. I prefer a single book (or a single box), pen, paper, and dice. I don't want to have to tote miniatures and multiple rules books.

I'm just not interested in 3.5. Monte's Arcana Unearthed, on the other hand, sounds very promising.

 

[Zaruthustran]

It doesn't sound like 3.5 is going to be very easy to carry around. I prefer a single book (or a single box), pen, paper, and dice. I don't want to have to tote miniatures and multiple rules books.

I agree that painted minis are very hard to carry around. You need a briefcase-size carrying case, with little compartments for each individual min. In you want to avoid scratching the paint job (which took you 6 hours to apply), you have to remove each min one at a time, move the mins on the battlemat one at a time, and replace the mins one at a time. And despite these precautions, arms and shields constantly break off and mins *will* need touch-up paint jobs. It's a hassle.

Plastic mins, on the other hand, are easy to transport. I have a bunch of Dwarven Forge prepainted plastics. I just dump them into one of those disposable plastic Tupperware containers by the handful, and toss that into my gaming backpack along with my books and dice bag. Quick and easy.

-z

 

[Greatwyrm]

On that issue, perhaps. I can also remember good games ruined by companies due to being too heavy handed in revisions.

While I don't think this will ruin D&D, I do think it has the real potential to limit the fun and utility of upcoming releases. That, I think, is worth voicing our opinion on in the hopes that they back away from this "miniatures in your face" marketing blitz and go back to their original 3e philosophy of "options not restrictions."

If WotC does go too far, and I'm not saying they will or won't, there's still nothing to worry about. We don't have to count on WotC alone for supplements anymore. Like Geoffrey said above, he's going to be taking a stronger look at Arcana Unearthed.

The whole thing about d20 is the ability to use fairly different rule sets, but still have everything be reasonably compatible. If WotC takes the core rules too far for most people to handle, there will be plenty of people willing to step in and provide what they think the public wants.

Don't think that just because you do or don't like a rule, WotC is staffed by complete idiots. They have Hasbro behind them now. If Hasbro does anything well, it's market research. I'm sure they've spent a lot of time with surveys and looking at what's come in from Sage Advice to see what people think does and doesn't work. Most of the changes will probably be geared toward satisfying the greatest number of people and FAQs.

Finally, I'll admit, this may be some very short-sighted attempt to shoe-horn people into buying the new mini line. If that's actually what it is, which I doubt, it's still of no concern. There are plenty of cheap alternatives to minis, including counters, dice, and simply not using them (as many have pointed out).

 

[Marius Delphus]

And unless you are an extremely good storyteller as a GM that can give a clear picture of what is going on in the battle to all the players, it just falls flat on its face.

Why, thank you!

 

[Monte At Home]

It's not too hard to imagine what this change will mean. The PH rules don't really assume minis now, just a minis mindset (the idea that you need to have some idea of where everyone is in the battle rather than simply keeping it all ambiguous).

The add-on rules in the DMG are specifically for figures. We can expect, then, diagrams showing spell areas of effect and things like that in the PH. Rules for how many squares your mini moves. Maybe (if they thought of it) they'll include Combat and Tactics like rules for changing the scale depending on what you need (increasing each square on your mat to 50 feet, for example, until opponents reach melee range). Unfortunately, they might even go so far as to start refering to figures rather than characters in the combat chapter.

(Let me say right now that I haven't seen 3.5 yet. I am, however, expecting more extensive changes than a lot of others seem to be.)

I use miniatures extensively in my games, but I'm by no means a miniatures gamer (I struggled to keep HeroClix from being very miniatures wargame-y). I am, however, really REALLY sympathetic toward people who don't use miniatures. What we presented in 3.0 was meant to be a compromise between a good game, serving various styles of play, and a company that really wanted to sell a lot of miniatures.

I'm also interested to see how these pre-painted plastic minis will be sold. We know that WotC is going to make them collectible, right?

http://www.gamingreport.com/article.php?sid=6869

That doesn't bode well for us role-players (as opposed to collectible miniatures game fans) unless they're also going to sell them individually or in non-random sets. Here's hoping.

 

[jdavis]

I figure that they will have a combat without minatures option section. And if they don't we don't use half of the rules for combat anyway, (it takes a rocket scientist to get a simple grapple to work by their rules). When we do combat we don't sweat the details, which is where you would need the mini's, combat is about discription and DM judgements and you don't sit around and try to to think about your move you get to the fighting and get done. I am serious when I say that the whole fact that mini's are at all popular is a complete suprise to me, when I first started playing I had no idea that you even needed them, I thought they were something that only hardcore gamers used at big conventions. Using Mini's would be a totally foreign idea, it just wouldn't be D&D anymore, it would be a board game. Once again that is not saying that they are not great for other people but if somebody said you can use mini's or you can never play again well I'd just never play D&D again, it just isn't something I have any interest in, there are plenty of games out there that don't require mini's, I'd just find one of them. They are not going to do that though so I am not worried, and I am happy that they will try to clear up some of the combat rules. For them to change it to force mini use they would have to change the rules, they are not going to do that, they are just going to clarify the rules and whether you are a mini fanatic or a mini hater you can't get too mad about them trying to fix their combat rules to make them work better. And if it does seem that they are trying to force mini's down our throats, well that's what house rules are for. This isn't a deal breaker on the 3.5 rules, but it is something to discuss, I have leared alot about how prevalent mini use is in just the last hour or so that I didn't know in the last 25 years of gaming, I didn't know I was in the minority by not using minis. I always figured they were a optional side group to D&D.